Chapter 1: Introduction to Oracle Wait Interface

Overview

Speed is the word that defines the twenty-first century. The previous century ‚ s saying, ‚“He who dies with the most toys wins ‚½ is now ‚“He who dies with the most high-speed toys wins. ‚½ We want speed in everything we do, be it in our personal lives or the business we conduct. You name it ‚ fast cars , fast computers, fast lanes , fast Internet connections, fast weight loss, fast cures, fast food, and so on.

Businesses compete with one another to be the first to introduce new products to the marketplace . The speed-to-market demand overrides the conventional process of software engineering that used to include such concepts as application analysis, design, code development, test, and implementation. Nowadays, programmers start coding before the requirements are established. And the requirements keep changing throughout the development lifecycle. Furthermore, the testing phase often is shortened or sacrificed to meet unrealistic production dates. Needless to say, many untested applications interact with production databases for the first time on the release day.

In tandem with today ‚ s fast-paced world, database sizes have increased as businesses have found value in keeping historical data longer, sometimes ‚“forever, ‚½ for various analyses to gain a competitive edge. Databases that do not scale well often result in higher processing time in spite of the availability of better and more reliable hardware.

These issues eventually flow downstream and quite often are relabeled as ‚“database performance ‚½ problems. Unfortunately, database administrators (DBAs) have to deal with this on a regular basis and take the blame. Corporate IT organizations expect DBAs to possess the required know-how and be available 24x7 for speedy resolution of all performance problems. Due to this, performance monitoring and optimization functions have gained prominence and consume most of a DBA ‚ s time. DBAs need reliable performance monitoring and tuning methods . Oracle fulfilled this requirement by architecting the Oracle Wait Interface (OWI) to help DBAs quickly and effectively diagnose performance problems.

This book is all about the Oracle Wait Interface. It gives DBAs a detailed working knowledge of how to use OWI and a practical approach to performance diagnostics and troubleshooting that is based on real experience with large and complex database installations. DBAs will gain an in-depth knowledge of the OWI methodology and will be able to apply the knowledge to solve performance issues.

In this chapter, we compare the OWI with the ratio-based methodology that is still practiced by many DBAs. We outline the limitations of the ratio-based method and highlight the advantages of OWI, thus establishing it as the methodology of choice. It is our sincere hope that this book will assist DBAs in transitioning to using OWI as the main Oracle performance optimization methodology.